


Along the Shore Where the Blood Moon Stands in Front of Me

by Pixeled



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Autopsy Photo Descriptions, Love, M/M, Mistakes, Regret, You can’t take back what you’ve done
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:35:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28447770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pixeled/pseuds/Pixeled
Summary: The blood red moon in his dreams ached in his chest like the bullet hole that killed the love of his life.But pain like that doesn’t kill you, even when you feel like it has.And he didn’t learn.
Relationships: Vincent Valentine/Veld
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	Along the Shore Where the Blood Moon Stands in Front of Me

**Author's Note:**

> To Amber Run “I Found”

“Director, sir?”

Tseng with the mission dossier complete, most likely. The one he’d use to probably send quite a few Turks to their end, despite him being there like some sort of Angel of Death, unable to truly do anything about it. That was just the nature of how this would end. How everything ended, really. How all things would be, moving forward. It was simpler years ago. He could save people. Now everyone he fostered could be canon fodder, and that made his heart beat slower like a shriveled stone when it should have beat red with four chambers, louder, stronger, harder. Maybe he should have fought more.

But _he_ would be fine, wouldn’t he? The man that didn’t deserve devotion anymore.

Was it time already? Tseng worked fast, so maybe it hadn’t been long at all, but it felt like a lifetime.

It felt like a lifetime he probably shouldn’t have been allowed to live, given who was buried, and how he stood on two feet in shiny black shoes that cast the shadow of a taller man, when it should have cast the shadow of a monster.

He had to squint to look, because he didn’t know, couldn’t figure it out. How much time had passed, exactly?

Was it Tseng who was supposed to be standing there? When he looked, instead of shoulder length hair brushed back severely, he saw the shorter black asymmetrical haircut of a slightly taller man for a moment.

The clock on the wall was different than it was a moment before, wasn’t it? Was he imagining that? The year on the calendar—wasn’t that different too? The chatter in the office—hadn’t that been lighter before? Laughs had echoed sometimes, right? It wasn’t this. Not this huddled almost panicked strategy, the styrofoam cups of coffee having built up and spilling out of the trash like the bodies he’d accumulated in the cavity of his chest like a toll he himself no longer took stock of, but the clockwork inside him would not and could not forget, continuing to tick forward as it hung off the waistcoat of a man with a shadowy face in a three-piece suit who was carving the toll into an ancient stone wall with a mythril knife that scraped and sparked.

If he wanted to look, he could have.

He used to think he could give and take the lives he’d put there, like erasing a mistake you made on a chalkboard, but now he understand what you took from the world, you could never truly give back. Doing a good deed didn’t erase the sins you already committed, and adding sins to the pile only added scratches to remind you of what you’d done, no matter what. And all he kept doing was add to these scratches. And though they hadn’t been made on his skin and he thought they didn’t register to others, he felt them spilling out of him in the form of bile in private.

The scars on his face were not enough. They didn’t even come close to atonement.

Sometimes at night, when he tried to justify his actions the most so that he could sleep—that’s when he tried to talk the most sense into himself, but the end result was that his head spun and for hours he lost his mind, walking along that shore with the mottled sand with naked feet where the gray rock face stood like an ancient tombstone, wind and salt brushing through his auburn hair like a cruel lover, the ocean dark and ominous, the moon forever red and huge and divine.

He only looked once.

Down at the bottom there were two longer scrapes. To anyone else they’d be meaningless, but to him, those were the marks that hurt the most, because they would never be close like that again.

And though he begged the ceiling to talk sense to him as if they were the celestial bodies, there was no response. He knew it was too late. There was no one to turn to. There was no one to forgive him. The dead did not speak, and he was there, living, alone.

The most he could do was use it as a warning sign. A makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take. A focal point so he didn’t lose sight of what he wanted. A scale that weighed the souls of the innocent and ushered whoever he could to safety.

But he could only save so many people, and damaging the ones who were left over was a fate worse than death, which he had never even considered when he set out. It was him who had damaged Tseng beyond repair, a man now, not a kid any longer. A broken man, at that. He was loyal, did as he was told, but there was something in his eyes before that was lost now. Duty was his driving force. The man he was? Who knew where that man was.

And the problem was that he didn’t ask. Didn’t try to repair what was broken—what _he_ had broken.

The warning sign was a nice idea. That’s all it was. A nice idea. In the end, he never heeded warnings. The bells that went off eventually stopped ringing and all that was left was the long reprieve of the vibration dying out and thrumming in him that should have made him pause, but it was long dead, wasn’t it? Already done? He pushed and pulled where he never should have, led where he should have stopped.

It was a warning sign that if you talk enough sense you lose your mind. Because humans are fallible and sense is nothing if you don’t utilize it like you should, and not as justification for your actions.

He didn’t think he’d still be here, moving so far and doing so much, but missing something so integral he never knew was such a deeply rooted part of him.

The Killed in Action report was dumped on his desk by an inter-office assistant with dark hair and severe bangs, a carelessly blank expression that didn’t even turn his way, chewing her gum like a piston, popping it like a pair of lungs that inhaled its shaky last breath and died upon that exhale.

That’s how he was told.

That’s how he found out.

And his lungs filled tremulous and knowing.

The manilla envelope was stamped crookedly and carelessly with unevenly applied red ink on the front with three letters.

K.I.A.

Killed in Action.

He exhaled and clarion trumpets signaled a war that was long over in his brain. The one where he pretended Vincent got away.

It was a nice idea. That’s all it was. A nice idea.

His own name was scrawled across the center in heavy black fountain pen that feathered because of the weight and texture of the manilla envelope, which was way too waxy for that type of ink, as if the very essence of his being was bleeding through like the stains of red-black blood that should have permanently colored his hands for all to see.

Perhaps everyone _could_ see.

Tseng certainly could.

There were very little details in that manilla envelope, but there was a slip of paper, hammered out on a 1950’s Typewriter with heavy hands and a fresh spool of ink, which he knew was Professor Hojo’s preferred method when transferring information, as his usual handwriting was a coded and tight small series of letters and numbers, controlled and nonsensical to anyone but himself. In cold clinical detail the paper stated Vincent’s badge ID number, date he joined The Turks, date of birth, age, and time of death. It stated, simply, that Vincent had threatened the project, was going to steal priceless data, and that he had compromised the integrity of the project several times, and that his body had been burned after an attempt on Professor Hojo’s life. He was subsequently shot through the heart and died.

He didn’t believe a word of it.

Below the slip of paper were two over-developed photographs from two angles of the body of Vincent Valentine on a cold slab of metal, a white sheet starting at his hip bones, the long scarring of the Y-incision that proved he was autopsied in stark relief to his pale skin, the spidery lines escaping the crater of the bullet wound running like the ink of his name on the envelope. It was the clear evidence of the point blank shot through the heart, hands laid on his chest as if he were sleeping peacefully, eyes shut forever.

If he walked along the stone wall now, would the salt air be filled with his ashes too, or was it all a lie?

He wondered if Vincent thought of him at all.

If he knew.

No, he probably didn’t.

He died then. Like Tseng, the light faded from his eyes. But even that wasn’t enough, because he deserved more.

He had missed Vincent more than he thought he would. He knew it was all a mistake.

But like that board in school where you could erase your mistakes, it was a lie.

His mistake was set in stone.

It wasn’t his bullet.

It wasn’t his gun.

But he’d sealed Vincent’s fate.

All because he found love where it wasn’t supposed to be.

Right in front of him.

But Vincent didn’t talk sense to him.

Vincent didn’t sound warning bells.

There was no clarion call to warn him of the war he’d lost but would not allow himself to fall.

But Vincent followed orders.

And Vincent followed those orders, head turned to look at Veld one last time before he stepped up onto the helipad, sanguine eyes unreadable.

And Vincent went quietly to the death that Veld orchestrated.

And there was no sense in that.

There was no sense in that at all.

The blood red moon in his dreams ached in his chest like the bullet hole that killed the love of his life.

But pain like that doesn’t kill you, even when you feel like it has.

And he didn’t learn.


End file.
